


the boneturner's tale

by seraf



Series: a page, turning [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Boneturning (The Magnus Archives), Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical The Flesh Content (The Magnus Archives), Character Study, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jewish Character, M/M, Slow Burn, Trans Michael "Mike" Crew, well. sorta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27313027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf/pseuds/seraf
Summary: i know it’s just phantom limb syndrome, but sometimes i swear it feels like my bone’s still out there, twisting in someone else’s arm.- mag049( a collision avoided by centimeters. )will update on saturdays.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Mary Keay, Michael "Mike" Crew & Gerard Keay, Michael "Mike" Crew/Gerard Keay
Series: a page, turning [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993744
Comments: 30
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. if you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. 
> 
> you encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. 
> 
> then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. 
> 
> \- paolo giordano, "the solitude of prime numbers"
> 
> ( see end notes for content warnings )

gerard keay is currently staring at his hand. 

more specifically, the malformed, warped thing that was  _ meant  _ to be his hand, folding oddly in on itself, the flesh drooping concave in the middle with the sudden absence of three of his metacarpals. a sudden wave of morbid curiosity strikes him, and he tremulously raises the other hand to poke at his limp palm, pressing down hard on either side and seeing how it just  _ crumpled.  _ a wave of nausea slid through him at the action, at the sick-wrongness of how it felt, how it looked, the throbbing pain still lancing up his arm. 

it had been such an innocuous gesture. the hulking mass of a man hadn’t seemed to hear him, so he had reached out, and then - and then he had  _ grabbed  _ gerry’s hand, the strength of his grip alone almost enough to crush it. which would have been bad, but not unmanageable, if his thick fingers hadn’t proceeded to sink through gerard’s skin, his muscle, his tendons - he could  _ feel  _ each part of his body as it was impossibly reached through. hyper-aware of the pulsing impulses that stretched muscle to tendon to nerve to bone, aware of how every motion he made was just electricity pumping through so much  _ meat.  _ and the sound it had made, tendons snapping and something cracking as his bones were pulled out of his hand almost  _ effortlessly.  _ a horrible squelching noise as tissue and nerves and blood are all displaced, awkwardly resettling around the absence of his finger bones. 

‘ sorry, ‘ jared hopworth grunts, in a voice that doesn’t sound particularly apologetic, and he drops gerry’s bones in a clattering pile on the table. ‘ thought you were someone else. ‘ 

_ like pick-up sticks,  _ is gerard’s first inane thought, staring at the three metacarpals. it’s bizarre to see something that should be inside your body and now just  _ isn’t.  _ his second thought is also a useless one, something along the lines of  _ huh. i would have expected them to be bloody.  _ his third is not so much a coherent thought as it is a silent, wordless scream of pain, bouncing off the inner walls of his skull. 

‘ um, ‘ he says eloquently, words lumping up thickly in his throat, like a clogged pipe, good hand twitching as he stares at the small bones on the table between them. ‘ sorry about that? don’t know who you were expecting. ‘

jared looks him over for a long moment, expression critical, and gerard fights back a hysterical laugh as the phrase  _ stop looking at me like i’m a piece of meat  _ leaps unbidden to the back of his mind. but it’s fitting, here. jared looks at him like he’s trying to divvy gerard into his usable parts. like he’s trying to find out whether or not gerard would be worth the effort of pulling apart. 

he feels  _ heavy  _ in his seat, suddenly very conscious of every bone in his body, every muscle, every quivering nerve. he knows what the shape of each of his limbs is like from the eye of a critical outsider, the pieces that make it up. moving feels like a gargantuan effort as he sits there under jared’s eye, like he has to remind his heart to pump blood through his chest, has to remind his lungs to expand, his nerves to fire, every autonomous function in his hands now. he swallows, and he’s too aware of every muscle that takes. almost panics for a moment at his breath cutting off as his larynx closes. 

he’s had a rare few encounters with the flesh before, but it was different than  _ this.  _ his mother has talked to tom haan a couple of times. gerard has done his best to be out of pinhole books on most of those occasions. the entity of  _ meat  _ isn’t quite his thing, and he’s got enough to worry about in his life without juggling vegetarianism into the mix after an encounter gone wrong. 

still. he’d met him once. it was different. the feeling of being evaluated for pieces . . . that had been the same. haan had looked at him with the bland indifferent kind of curiosity you might examine a grocery store meat aisle with, and then looked away, continuing to talk to mary. 

‘ doesn’t matter, ‘ jared says, arms - one pair of them, at least. the shape of his jacket implies he’s got  _ more -  _ crossing over his massive chest. g-d, he’s built like a brick shithouse. his tone of voice leaves no room for arguing, and gerard’s got enough self preservation to pick up on  _ that,  _ at least. he shrugs as ambivalently as possible, like it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other, even as he delicately prods at the center of his palm, feeling how much his finger sinks downwards. till it’s almost pressing the table. 

g-d, even if it didn’t hurt, gerard thinks he might feel a little sick. 

‘ then it doesn’t matter to me, ‘ he says, trying to sound calmer about this situation. in control. showing that you were afraid of something was like baring your throat. asking for it. so he wasn’t afraid of jared. so he pokes at the empty meat of his hand like it’s a novelty, rather than something that terrifies him a little. ‘ i’m gerard keay. ‘ 

jared doesn’t look particularly impressed by that, but it doesn’t appear to raise any kind of  _ anger  _ in him, or any sort of familiarity at all. gerard’s . . . not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. usually, the things he meets . . . they at least  _ know  _ of his mother and her prying hands. he finds he’s at a bit of a loss. 

he looks one of gerard’s bones over again, holding it up in the light like a pawn broker examining a watch. ‘ ‘m not really one for hurting  _ kids,  _ ‘ he grunts, finally, tossing it back down on the table. ‘ besides. your bones aren’t very good, you know. ‘ 

gerard physically bites down on his tongue until he feels blood seep between his teeth to remind himself not to immediately retort. that it is, most likely,  _ good  _ that jared thinks he’s a child and that his bones aren’t worth taking. that he shouldn’t immediately correct him. it’s harder than it should be. g-d, there’s something wrong with him. he just nods, faintly. 

‘ here, ‘ jared states, and tosses gerard’s bones back onto the table. they rattle as they roll slightly, landing just within gerry’s reach. he feels a little bit queasy, looking at them. with his good hand, he picks one of them up. 

‘ what am i meant to do with these? ‘ 

jared gives him a smile. it’s not a nice expression. he holds one of his hands out, about the size of gerard’s skull and with two too many fingers. ‘ you trust me? ‘ there was a leer that he could almost  _ feel  _ in jared’s voice. like he knew gerard didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter. for a moment, he considers just saying  _ no,  _ and just finding a way to cope with the loss of his hand. but common sense wins out, and he dumps the thin bones back into jared’s hand. 

‘ yeah, ‘ he says, shrugging, as though this happens to him every other week. ‘ close enough, anyway. ‘ a thought strikes him, remembering just how it had  _ felt  _ to get them torn out in the first place. ‘ . . . is this going to hurt? ‘ 

‘ doesn’t for me, ‘ jared says, shrugging, his shoulders looking less defined and more like a wave rippling through a hunk of muscle with the motion. ‘ couldn’t say for you. ‘ 

deeply reassuring. 

still, what  _ choice  _ did he have? 

he drops his own bones into the limp palm of his hand, and extends both hand and bones to jared. though he supposes - should he think of them as separate objects? they were just . . . parts of a whole. the thought  _ ingredients  _ comes to his mind, and he immediately forces it back down just as quickly. 

in retrospect, he probably  _ shouldn’t  _ have trusted jared. at least, not when he said it wouldn’t hurt. 

it did. of  _ course  _ it did. jared had no . . . method or care in the way he pushed gerard’s bones back into his hand. simply placed one massive thumb over where all three of them rested and pushed  _ down,  _ shoving both his own thumb and gerard’s bones through the skin of his hand, into the meat of it. they were still clustered together, in the way they had settled in his palm when he had handed them across the table, and gerard could feel, excruciating and agonizing, the way that his nerves, his muscles, were swelling to  _ accommodate  _ for that. tearing apart and re-attaching themselves to the bones, reshaping his hand to be a twisted, vertical thing.

he doesn’t scream. he can be proud of himself for that much, at least. he doesn’t scream. 

but it’s a close thing as jared takes his wrist and begins almost - massaging his bones back into a flat line, tearing right through all of those recently-created, recently-connected tendons and muscles, rendering them nothing but useless, broken bits of tissue. he flattens them out, pushing them roughly back into their existing places, and then withdraws his hand. 

still, something feels  _ wrong  _ when gerard tentatively flexes his fingers, a jolt that travels up his arm. it borders the familiar and - something completely foreign, a  _ wrongness  _ that sets his teeth grinding in his skull. 

and jared takes his wrist again. 

‘ messed that up, ‘ he says, by means of explanation, holding gerard’s hand up in the light, as if to see it better. ‘ two of ‘em are in each other’s places. ‘ and with no further warning, his fingers are in the meat of gerard’s body again, ripping the two bones out with the sick and shifting sound of bone sliding against meat, the sick crack of severed tendons, and rearranging them. 

you would think it might hurt less, when you knew what was coming. 

you would be  _ wrong,  _ of course. 

gerard is biting down on his other wrist as jared fiddles with the thin metacarpals, almost drawing blood with the way each change in direction or angle makes his body jolt and his teeth clamp down harder. when jared finally releases him, when his jaw unclenches, the skin near the white indentations where his teeth had been is a dark purple, the blood slowly flowing back to it as he watches, flexing his fingers. 

they’re all in the right  _ place  _ now, he can feel that much, but it doesn’t change the nausea that bubbles up in his stomach. like he can never be . . . unaware of them again. he can feel the pulse of muscle wrapped around them. their inherent  _ place  _ in his body. a slow, deep, beating, through his marrow, through his musculature. his heartbeat, he thinks. 

‘ thanks, ‘ he says, and his voice cracks, something jared grins at. ‘ i . . . who were you expecting? ‘ 

‘ doesn’t matter, ‘ jared says, and gerard can hear the machine-line crack of his bones, one after the other, of joints where they shouldn’t be. ‘ real question is what  _ you’re  _ doin’ here.  _ gerard.  _ ‘ he drawls out the name like it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, and gerard barely holds back a comment about their names sounding pretty damn similar, when it came down to it. 

‘ family business, ‘ he says, unable to stop his hand from twitching, from compulsively flexing the fingers again, again, again. ‘ my mother knows a lot about . . . old books. special books. she’s taught me some of it. we heard something that made it sound like you might have one. i just . . . ‘ he waves a hand vaguely. ‘ wanted to check, you know? ‘ 

‘ try and take it, and i’ll pull out your spine piece by piece. wonder how long you might feel it for. ‘ 

so much for not wanting to hurt kids, gerry thought, vaguely queasy. ‘ i’m not going to take it. i just wanted to look at it. if - if that’s okay? ‘ he holds his hands up over the table. easy, nonthreatening. like talking to a wild animal taking its sweet time to decide whether or not he was worth mauling. ‘ i can pay you for it and everything. not - like i’m buying the book. just to see it. you can watch me. ‘ 

jared’s skin  _ contorts,  _ twisting and flexing slightly, and another eyeball pops up between his left eye and his nose. there’s a spark of something like interest in it. ‘ how much? ‘ 

in response, gerry just dangles the envelope of money he carries on him when there’s a chance he might have to buy one of these books from two fingers. it weighs in his hand heavily enough that for a second, even jared manages to pull an impressed sort of look to the heavy set of his face. 

he might have been handsome, once, gerry thinks absently, as jared sets the book in front of him. but there was something too  _ physical  _ about him. like the way it was always a little unnerving to see the way that bodybuilders’ veins throbbed too close to the surface of the skin. like if you touched them hard enough, you could  _ pop  _ them, blood spurting out. 

the book itself looked old. most of them  _ did,  _ after all. it was a pretty featureless black paperback, the white letters in a nondescript font on the front titling it  _ the boneturner’s tale.  _

gerard opens it to the inner cover, thin fingers tracing the stitching of the spine, sturdy in its age. the paper it was made out of; good quality, but not hand-cut or anything particularly special. it was well-read - someone had left it in the sun for long enough that part of the deep black of the paper cover is a sort of dull blue-grey, washed out from the exposure, and the spine has a crease to it. 

( running his finger down that crease, gerry can feel the unnatural way the paper ridges and bumps, and the term  _ spine  _ suddenly seems too hideously accurate. ) 

there’s what he was expecting. the simple bookplate marked with  _ from the library of jurgein leitner.  _

but it seems like there’s something else there, too. hanging by one dirty corner like a child’s tooth dangles from a thin strap of skin, there’s another  _ ex libris  _ bookplate, one looking - more like it might have been from a legitimate library, though it appears to have been pried off to reveal leitner’s name underneath, and crumpled. 

carefully, gerard smooths it back out, fingertips ironing out the creases. 

it’s a simple enough library bookplate; there are the names and dates, there is the stamp-marking that denotes it having, apparently, once belonged to chiswick library. there are two bloody partial fingerprints on the off-white paper, looking old enough that they’re a rusty brown, but gerry  _ recognizes  _ that color. and, he thinks, so does the book. 

something buzzes in the back of his mind, though, when he turns his eyes away from the bookplate. something that won’t let him continue on to read the opening pages of  _ the boneturner’s tale  _ like he means to, or even fish his polaroid and notebook out of his bag. annoyed, he smooths out the crumpled paper again. 

it catches his eye, this time. 

the most recent name and date, denoting in rushed blue letters with sharp edges that  _ the boneturner’s tale  _ was checked out about a month ago by one michael crew. 

————————————————————————————————————

‘ thanks again for the help, mike. we’re so understaffed right now, and honestly, this place is a mess as it is . . . ‘ naomi trails off, wringing her hands as she looks for somewhere that  _ isn’t  _ waterlogged where she can put the box mike is holding. ‘ just . . . ‘ she sighs. ‘ just carry that upstairs for now. we’ll take over some of the reading desks and just - leave all the boxes there until we can fix the shelves and the flooding damage. ‘ 

mike nods, hiking the box back up in his arms and heading up the stairs to the - significantly drier - part of the library, shoes squelching against the wet carpet on the way over to the staircase. he angles the box so it’s half-perched on one hip and his chin is hanging onto it, which makes walking into an awkward shuffle of a thing, but stops the box from threatening to slip out of his hands. slowly, he sideways-walks to one of the desk, leaning his weight up on his toes to nudge it onto one of the already crammed desks, beginning to pull individual books out one by one, sorting them into piles of ‘probably unsalvageable’ and ‘just a little damp.’ 

he’s dithering over whether a copy of  _ one flew over the cuckoo’s nest  _ should be considered unsalvageable or not if the book  _ itself  _ is mostly intact, but the cover through to the table of contents have been turned into so much pulp, when there’s a shout from downstairs. the book in his hands drops to the floor as he hurries back to the stairs, hopping down them three at a time in his haste. ‘ naomi? are you okay?? ‘ 

he freezes for a moment as he sees naomi crouching in front of one of the bookshelves, her hands soaked in blood. his own starts to pound in his ears as he tries to think of what to do. slowly, like you might walk towards a ticking bomb, he creeps towards her. ‘ do i need to call - are you hurt? ‘ 

‘ no, it’s . . . no, it isn’t mine, ‘ she says, slowly standing up, her legs shaking underneath her. ‘ i think - i think it isn’t, at least. i was just going through this shelf, and it - the books - ‘ she waves a hand, and he picks his way across the damp carpet to look around her shoulder, leaning to the side a little. ‘ the books - i think they’re  _ bleeding?  _ ‘ mike’s heart rises immediately to his throat, a grim kind of resolve filling him. but naomi - naomi has the kind of tone to her voice of someone  _ desperately  _ wanting to be proven wrong. he can give her that, at least. 

he rests a hand on her shoulder. ‘ i can deal with these ones, naomi. i’ll look through them and see which ones are going to be fine. ‘ he pulls one of them out at random, flipping through the pages with an air of ease completely at odds to the tension building in the back of his head, the desire to just tell her to  _ leave.  _ it’s taking every ounce of his social ability to be this casual as it is. ‘ i don’t think it’s blood, anyway. sometimes there can be chemicals that give off that look. there was something like it when there was a septic leak at my place. nasty stuff. ‘ 

it isn’t, technically, a lie. 

naomi looks . . . slightly reassured by that, at least. ‘ alright, maybe that’s it. i don’t know where any blood could’ve come from, there hasn’t  _ been  _ anyone here, and i don’t think - ‘ she’s wringing her hands, stressing herself out again. ‘ do you think i should call the police? ‘ 

he shakes his head. ‘ come on. if it  _ couldn’t  _ be blood, then that means it  _ isn’t,  _ right? head upstairs. like i said, i’ve got this. ‘ his voice, on the last sentence, bites off a little bit harsher than he intends, because he can’t stop  _ staring  _ at the bookshelf. at the blood, at what is, no matter what he might say to get naomi out of the room for a moment,  _ undoubtedly  _ blood, seeping out of the books like an artery runs through the shelf. like something’s cut it open. 

naomi looks . . . a little relieved, at least, and nods, looking queasily once again at the books. ‘ just . . . call up to me if you need any help, mike, ‘ she says, in the kind of voice people use when they mean  _ please, please, don’t actually ask me for help, though i’ll feel obliged to give it if you  _ do  _ ask. i’ll resent you the whole time.  _ mike knows by now the expressions people wear, the weight their words have, when they offer help or friendship or a hand up with the silent plea that it isn’t accepted. 

he gives her a little wave, and waits until her creaking footsteps have ascended halfway up the stairs before crouching in front of the shelf, knee pressing into the damp carpet, not caring about the way his pants lazily soak up some of the water. 

it’s, undeniably, stupid of him, but - there’s a curiosity, morbid and bright-twisting, in his chest, and he relents to it all too easily. one thumb flicks out and drags through the blood that seeps out of the books, and his tongue darts over it. the taste is familiar. but  _ strange,  _ too. it tastes like blood. like lips chewed to the point of breaking or cut fingers jammed into mouths, that copper-iron-salt taste that twinges against his tongue. 

but it’s strange. it’s strange in the way that he can  _ feel  _ his own pulse. in the way he’s suddenly so aware of  _ what  _ the blood is, and how much of it he has. that he’s tasting something that must have been part of a person once. not that they were hurt here. somehow, he knows that much. but it  _ was  _ someone’s, once, and he’s  _ consuming  _ part of them. 

it’s not a comfortable realization, and he hastily wipes his hands off down his pants. 

the books. it’s something to do with the books. 

well. he told naomi he’d deal with them, anyway. he picks up one of the small sections of tarp they’ve been resting things out on, and spreads it on the carpet next to him, pulling out one book and then another, flipping through blood-stained pages impatiently, looking for  _ something.  _ he’ll know it when he sees it, he thinks. ( still, even as he drops one mundane book and then the next into the discarded pile on the tarp, he’s sorting them into piles of least to most salvageable, separating those that are still readable from those that have been soaked by seemingly sourceless gore. ) 

it looks mundane, really. 

and that’s the thing about it. it looks  _ too  _ mundane, lodged between two simpering romance novels that mike personally thinks are probably  _ improved  _ by the blood soaking through their pages. comparatively to their dramatic painted covers with shirtless men, and their pages dripping blood, the simple black book seems . . . forgettable, really. 

but for the fact that its pages are still a pristine white. 

the job of organizing forgotten, mike slowly pulls it from its place on the shelf with tremulous fingers. he can  _ feel  _ his pulse in his fingertips where they meet with the book’s spine, where he smooths over the featureless cover - nothing there but the sun-faded black paper, and the white letters that spell out the title. 

_ the boneturner’s tale.  _

with a surgeon’s delicacy, mike opens the page to the front cover, and his breath catches at the  _ familiarity  _ there. at the sinking feeling in his chest that settles into a grim resolve. in neat letters, the stamp as red as the blood that still drips down from one shelf to the one below, the book is marked  _ from the library of jurgein leitner.  _

his immediate thought is to  _ leave.  _ to get out as soon as possible, book taken with him, to figure out how it works. it’s his first  _ real  _ clue in months, everything else a confusing tangle of all the different theologies he’s tried to dive into to find answers; in sixteenth century spiritualism and mendelbrot’s theories of fractals and the infinite and old dissertations on the link between magic and insanity, and no  _ real  _ answers. this is - something. it’s something he can use. 

slowly, with a deliberate set to his motions, he tucks the book into his bag, and forces himself to take his hands off of the straps. to not think about it as he pulls the rest of the books off the shelf, one by one, meticulously sorting them into piles. refuses to let his eyes dart to it or to let his mind wander in its direction, even as he carries the books up in piles to naomi, even as the two of them sort through the most-damaged of the books and decide most of them have to be thrown out, even as he has to toss them in the dumpster of the restaurant three buildings down. cautious, precise, in his movements. like if he thinks about it too hard, they’ll  _ know.  _ and he won’t be able to walk out with the book. 

his exit is a subtle one, checking the library clock and announcing with some dismay that his mother expected him back home fifteen minutes ago, saying a hurried goodbye to naomi as he slings his bag over his shoulder and half-jogs out of the library, his haste now paired with an excuse. ( a mundane and completely baseless one. his mother is dead, he has no home, and the last thing he had that could count as one is an hour and a half away from here. ) 

just a few more months, and then he might actually be able to rent a flat or something, he reminds himself, as he carefully hops from the tree branch to the railing of the creaking fire escape, making his way up the steps as carefully as he can. his legs burn from walking this many flights of stairs almost every day, but he doesn’t have much of  _ another  _ choice. it was a lucky discovery, finding out that the top floors of this dorm building are pretty much entirely empty. he’s been luckier still not to have been discovered, sliding through the window from the fire escape every night. it’s good, under the circumstances. the lights work, he’s not too picky for the bed, and, importantly - it gives him some privacy he can read in. 

speaking of which. 

he shuts the window behind him, trying not to slam it in his urgency, toing off his shoes and socks as he upends his bag onto the thin dorm carpet, things unceremoniously pouring out in a tide of paper and non-perishables in their cellophane wrapping. in the dying sunlight that seeps through the window like blood into fabric, _ the boneturner’s tale  _ looks almost . . . safe. normal. 

he knows it isn’t. he knows what it  _ is.  _

  
for a moment, he considers burning the thing. it would probably be the smart thing to do. but even as the thought crosses through his mind, he’s pulling it towards himself, flipping past the bookplate that marked it as  _ from the library of jurgein leitner,  _ to the opening pages of the book, countenance set as the tune of marrow begins to throb in his ears. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings once again for body horror. it's the flesh.

he doesn’t have the words for them. 

he doesn’t have the words for them _yet,_ he corrects himself, working his lip between his teeth as he slowly pages through one of _the boneturner’s tale_ ’s chapters. he’ll find them. but all he knows now is that there’s a creature made of fractalling light and white-hot agony chasing him. there is something that lives in filth and rot and insects, and there is something that deals with the _body,_ with the physicality of it, telling him where every piece of himself sits. he can’t think of any gods in any pantheons he’s been trying to read about that would immediately fit that, especially since the books themselves - well, they aren’t exactly religious texts, are they? _journal of a plague year_ exists, outside of the copy he had found. 

( there are stories he’s picked up, though how true they are, he has no idea - volunteering at libraries and thrift stores and rare book dealers, they’re always glad for an extra pair of hands they don’t need to pay for, sometimes he can turn the subject towards leitner. there are stories, there. of what had appeared to be a trashy young adult paperback, but that had made someone break down crying after days, talking about how their reflection wasn’t _them,_ anymore. how they didn’t have any control over it. an older looking book that had been found discarded in a ‘read while you wait’ bin in a doctor’s office, that started a fight in the waiting room that caused the deaths of three people. my sister woke up with her sheets filled with soil, dreaming of being buried alive. one of my customers returned it, and - there are rumors that he chewed off his own fingers, but i haven’t seen him since he gave me back that book. i know someone who knows someone who said there _had_ been one that let you see what people were lying to you about. there’s no way he can parse the truth, or how _much_ of the truth is being told. but there are enough stories that it _can’t_ be a coincidence. ) 

so. what he knows for certain. there is a power for flesh and bones and blood, one for filth and rot and disease, and something of lightning and fractals and doors that go nowhere and white-hot pain. he’ll go with what he can _see_ for himself. what he can _prove._

even as he pages through _the boneturner’s tale,_ he wonders if it can really save him. but he opened the book, and he _knows_ that’s stepping over a threshold of sorts. besides, what other choices does he have right now? 

_i’ll sleep on it,_ he decides, carefully closing the book and holding it to his chest. it would let him think of a plan of action, a way it could possibly help him. his dreams are uneasy shifting things that pulse-pound, and he can’t remember them when he wakes, but it’s better than impossible corridors. 

the answer, when it dawns on him, is a relatively simple one. 

the lichtenberg figure ties itself to his scar. to that brand cast into his skin that trails lines of torment across his body. so perhaps ridding himself of one will get rid of the other. 

he wonders if it will hurt. he doesn’t doubt it will. 

how do you prepare for something like this? he’s not . . . _really_ sure how it’ll work, just that he _knows_ that he will be able to reach into himself. to twist the cuts of meat that make him up. so he . . . does what he can, to prepare. steals a small tarpaulin from where it was cable-bound to a pile of logs outside a house a few blocks down, buys a few different kinds of over-the-counter painkillers. steals a couple, too. they’re _expensive,_ and he’s not sure he’ll be able to take the bottles with him when he moves on from where he’s staying now, and he can’t justify the cost if he has to leave them. so he takes them, and tries to feel guilty, but . . . all he can feel is a blunt justification. desperate times, after all. 

it feels like he’s planning a murder, setting up in his room the next morning - he wanted as much light as he could get, and if he tried it at night, a window being illuminated where it shouldn’t be might get a glance from someone who _knew_ there was supposed to be no residents there. so it’s almost noon, a lovely sunny day, and the windows are stripped bare of anything that might obscure the light. it’s in the small bathroom, the door hanging open and letting the sun stream in, the boneturner’s tale propped up on the sink. it seems . . . too cheerful, really. 

he’s almost _reassured_ by the smell. not of ozone, not of sickly-sweet rot, but of . . . meat, somehow. a rich iron kind of scent, almost like rust, almost like cooking meat. not _bad,_ and faint enough that it wasn’t overwhelming, but that made it seem more _real._ like he could stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

speaking of which. 

it’s with some reluctance that he peels himself out of his clothes, one piece at a time, kicking off starchy jeans and letting a shirt bulky enough to hide the sharp edges of his body hit the floor, eyes dragging up at himself in the mirror when he had finally stripped down. 

the book _thrums,_ almost, in front of him, as he swallows a brightly sour feeling down, something like the taste of bile, taking himself in. _this isn’t what you look like. it isn’t what you want to look like. it isn’t the form you could be best in. don’t you want to fit your body? don’t you want to achieve your best self?_

the out-of-place swell to his chest. the way his shoulders instinctively curled in on themselves, making him even shorter than he already was. his height altogether, for that matter. the shape of his hips. the way two of his fingers had broken and never quite healed right, still a little crooked. the unevenness of his teeth, not ever quite enough to justify braces, but enough that he could _feel_ it. the way what little body fat he managed to cling onto always fell to his thighs. the roundness of his face. the dark circles that seemed to hollow themselves permanently under his eyes. the ugly, still-healing marks from where his skin had rotted. how small his hands were. how _delicate_ he looked, stripped of all his layers. stripped down to what he _really_ was, when all pretenses were dropped. just a body. just so much meat, wrapped in a flimsy integumentary system, with electricity pulsing erratically through it. this is what he was. _all_ he was. 

speaking of which. 

his fingers instinctively twitch, tracing those silver-white lines over his skin, past where the scar tissue ends, as he twists this way and that, looking over his shoulder at the mirror at the worst, knotting part of the lichtenberg figure, where the lightning had struck like a whip-crack over the plane of his back. it wound in maddening fractals, taking up most of his back, creeping up the side of his neck to the edges of his cheek, working its way over his ribs, arching over one of his hips and down his thigh. a body-wide brand. binding him to . . . _something._

he takes four acetaminophen dry, still staring at himself in the mirror. still tracing those lines. the way they twisted the corner of one of his lips up. the places where he could _swear_ they went under his hair, climbing up his scalp to twist phantom electric fingers in his curls, but had no way of telling if they were actually marked out in his skin or just in his mind unless he shaved his head down. the dulled hearing in one ear.

it makes him nauseous to look at, and he gulps down a mouthful of air, swearing for a moment that he can _taste_ ozone. but the bathroom is still illuminated by the cheerful afternoon sun, and he _refuses_ to give in to the impulse that makes him want to look out the window. refuses to let it occupy any more of his mind. 

_you can change it. you can change it. you can change it._

it’s like a drumbeat, heavy and intense, emanating out from the book, the swell of it growing stronger with every moment he hesitates, every brush of his fingertips over his own flawed skin. for a moment, he resists, staring at himself in the mirror. it’s not unlike when you say a word too many times, he muses, looking himself over. it ceases to be a word. his body ceases to be his, to be _familiar,_ just something bland and empty and _physical_ staring back at him. 

he can’t resist the call any longer. erratically, he’s flipping the book open to a random page of the boneturner’s tale, eyes scanning the pages, tearing through it with a frenzy that scares some part of him, deep in the back of his mind that can’t quite reduce itself to flesh. 

the book, at least, seems to know what it’s doing more than he does, and the story he lands on is one about the baker’s son, a young man with a swathe of freckles across his cheek like the constellations above, and the boneturner’s desire to keep them. the natural beauty of them, in star patterns that couldn’t be seen anywhere on earth. the culmination of that story comes with the boneturner reaching his hands delicately through the man’s cheek, pulling away that layer of skin and leaving the muscle and tissue bare, the patch of dark red appearing like a blush, forever staining his face. 

it’s close enough to what he needs to work. he _hopes_ it’s close enough to what he needs. ( this one seems more... _active._ not passive. not as though just reading it will do anything. he needs to _act._ ) 

he leans over the sink, drinking straight from the faucet for a moment, wet hair clinging in curls to his forehead. he couldn’t say for sure whether he’s just procrastinating or whether he means it practically; less likely to faint if he’s well hydrated. 

there’s only so long he can put it off for, though. 

he presses his hand to his ribs, feeling the sharp jut of them, the way his skin clings to them, the fractals that arch over his chest, his side. leaves his palm there, over his hammering heartbeat, and thinks about what a body is. thinks about the pulsating, squeezing organ he can feel through the fragile bone-cage that protects it, swallowing and regurgitating that pumping, flowing blood. thinks about the skin itself - like a thin paper coating holding together all that _meat,_ wrapping it together into a neat package. an imperfect package. so easily torn through. he thinks about his scar, and a hatred that isn’t entirely his bubbles up in his stomach like bile. _your body is all that you are, and it felt entitled to that. to forever rend you imperfect, branding its mark into the-meat-that-is-you. your mind is shifting, and those marks may be fixed, but it has tried to prevent your form from being perfect. don’t you want to change that? don’t you want to be your unmarred self?_

it’s as he thinks that ( or maybe as he _doesn’t_ think that; the voice doesn’t feel entirely like his own ) that his hand passes through his skin, through his tissue, like water rippling smoothly, quick to cover it. it’s bloodless. painless, so far, with his fingertips just slowly, tentatively, touching his bare bone. slowly, carefully, his fingers curl, tugging upwards. _the skin,_ he thinks, like he’s instructing his body on the right way to mold itself. _change the skin._

pulling his hand up, back out of his chest, isn’t effortless in the way dipping it into it was - there’s a feeling like he’s pushing against cellophane wrap, stretched taut, and he can _see_ where his fingertips are pushing up against it, the skin coming away from his chest slowly, peeling away from his bones, his muscles, his blood, just _stretching_ up and away. 

and then, a sound like tearing paper, and his hand breaks through. 

there’s a giddy kind of relief that floods him, seeing his own bloodless fingertips poking back through his skin. he steels his nerves - wants to close his eyes, resists the urge - and pulls, tearing a patch of skin about the size of his palm off the side of his ribs, almost _neatly._ his head swims as he looks at it, the patch laced with silver fractals, standing out against the color of his skin. 

did it work? maybe this would be it. the thing that does it. carefully, he sets the removed skin down on the tarpaulin, and reaches for the skin of his unmarred hip, far away from even the phantom reaches of his scar. in the past, when he had tried to interrupt the scar by cutting across it, it had just re-appeared _over_ the old scar tissue. if he let this heal naturally - _if_ it healed naturally - there was a chance it’d just do the exact same thing. 

so he presses his fingers into his unmarred skin, and peels back a patch of it. it’s the strangest feeling, removing skin from flesh so . . . bloodlessly. he can _feel_ the air gently stinging the open - is it a wound? does it count as a wound? the open part of his body, then, but it just feels as though he’s been . . . unpeeled, almost. stripped down, in the truest sense of the words. 

carefully, he takes the patch of bare, unscarred skin. it’s thinner than he thought it would be, dangling limply from his fingers like a handkerchief. he drapes it over the bare patch on his ribs, and massages at the ends of the patch of skin, working it into the skin of his chest with little rolls of the pads of his fingers. the effect is . . . well, it’s a strange one, to be certain. the skin on his thighs was slightly darker than his ribs, so there’s just a patchwork-looking dark blotch interrupting the reaching arch of the scar. he decides not to look at the bared flesh that sits neatly at the juncture of his hip and thigh, carefully pulling his boxers up over it and seeing if the fabric sticks to it. they’re loose enough that they don’t, for now. 

on wobbling legs, he makes his way over to the bed, feeling just a little light headed, and lies down on his back, careful not to press against the bared tissue of his thigh. he takes a long, _long_ sip of water - he’s going to give himself a day to sleep. recuperate. and then see if it _worked._

g-d, he knows its for the best, especially playing with powers like this. that he _should_ rest. that it exhausts some part of him - not to mention practically speaking, he can’t really get dressed while there’s still the bare patch on his hip that might get exacerbated by wearing pants. but he’s _restless,_ in a way he can’t put words to. like something’s driving him forwards, even further than this. 

maybe it’s morbid curiosity. maybe it’s the influence of whatever power squats behind these pages. maybe it’s just boredom. 

but for one reason or another, mike crew lies in bed for a total of thirty-seven minutes before giving up entirely on the idea of trying to sleep, and then slips back out, picking the book up again and sitting on the floor, slowly beginning to go through the stories again. there are so many things he _could_ change, after all. maybe some way to strip the scar from the damage it caused to his nerves, get rid of the pain it sometimes sent echoing through his body. maybe even _silly_ changes. shallow things. his height. the ache to his back from years of bad posture. maybe . . . well. maybe some changes he’s wanted to make for awhile. 

it can’t hurt to read a little bit more, at least. he turns to a random story and begins again. 

————————————————————————————————————

where does your flesh come from? what makes it _yours?_ what defines _you?_

your long fingers, your thin wrists, come from your mother. your height from your father, though you’ve never met him. the hair that threatens your roots, creeping over the dye-black, is the same as hers. so are her high cheekbones, placed in your face, the proud arch of her spine you’ve tried so hard to slouch away, her pale skin. you don’t know your father, but he still dictates what your body is, doesn’t he? the parts that do not belong to her come from him - the set to his jaw, left in your face, the color of your eyes, borrowed from him. a stranger’s imprint, like fingerprints left in clay. 

the only things that truly belong to _you,_ then, are the ones that you create yourself. the ways your body _changes._

that scar running down the length of your arm that you got so long ago you can barely remember anything about the incident, other than the smell of blood and the realization that you were _screaming,_ and a creature so much bigger than yourself. the muscle mass to your shoulders that you’ve built up yourself, deceptive in how slight you still look, but the _strength_ behind them if you try is palpable. don’t you enjoy it, secretly? that strength? the look in peoples’ eyes when they realize that you’re more solid than you look? 

even the small things, like the indents in your ears from closed-over piercings. a failed measure, perhaps, but still one that left its mark. that made some tiny, immutable _change_ to you. claimed one speck of your body back to be your own. to be closer to that _perfect_ form. your tattoos . . . well, they aren’t perfect, are they? your hand is unsteady, the ink fading. the one you gave yourself three months ago is barely distinguishable from the places where you can see darker blood vessels running underneath your skin. that same mottled purple-blue, fading into white. 

don’t you want your body to be yours? don’t you want to _fit_ yourself? to have the one piece of you that really matters molded in your own image? you are nothing but this fleeting flesh, after all, and once it is gone, you are as well. best to spend what little time you have in a well-crafted vessel. 

try it. try it. 

follow the curve of your ribs and bend them in the way that you want. turn them into beautiful shapes. add more teeth, if you want - run your fingertips over their new points, a little too sharp for someone’s mouth. _someone’s,_ though. not yours. this is how you want them, and so they fit your mouth as though you were made to be this way, because your hard palate and your gums give way to the gentle tug of your sculpting. 

roll your femurs between your fingers like shaping a snake out of dough, until you are inches taller. or add some vertebrae, if you prefer. leave yourself looking down on everyone. you’re going to get those askance looks no matter what you do - wouldn’t it be better if they were _properly_ afraid? if they had a reason, a real reason, to shrink away from you? 

borrow or steal from others, they aren’t utilizing them correctly, anyway. not in the same way you _could._ fill your arms with eyes, blinking and terrible in your body. give yourself a second pair of arms, and see how much _more_ you can do. strip the muscles from a runner and tie them to your own bones, and marvel in your own speed. 

wouldn’t it be something? to have a body that belongs to you? to have a _choice_ in its shape? 

( gerry shuts the book for a moment, fingertips rubbing at his forehead, as though that can drown out the presence of the voice he _feels,_ resonating through his marrow. that aches across his body like a week of hard exercise. jared nods, if that was only to be expected. ‘ it does’at, sometimes. gave me a proper migraine the first time i finished it. you done with it, then? ‘ 

gerry shakes his head. ‘ no. just gimme a second. got a little bit of a weird feeling there. it’s nothing, really, ‘

the unspoken _understanding_ in jared’s dull eyes worries him more than he wants to show. so he doesn’t show it at all. rubs at his temples for another second until the lie that the feeling is gone almost seems plausible, and opens it again. )

————————————————————————————————————

he’s been leaving the patch of skin unbothered for days now. almost a full week. the . . . wound? has also been left alone, mostly, though he’s kept it aired out as often as possible - there seems to be a thin layer of skin beginning to grow back over it, which is something, at least. he’s been . . . if he’s honest, he’s been afraid to look at the newly-covered patch where his scar used to be. his dreams have been free of electric corridors, but that might have just as much to do with him using the book as he is now as it does with whether or not the scar tissue is actually _gone._ and he can’t use it forever. _journal of a plague year_ showed that much. there will be a price to pay. 

so he tries, for almost a week, to act as though everything is normal. to act as though he isn’t constantly hearing the sound of his own blood, as though he doesn’t feel every heartbeat rattling his ribcage. as though he’s not starting to be aware of the _other_ people around them, the pieces and cuts of meat that make them up, the contracting and expanding planes of muscle, the ill-fitting bones. he could reshape them too, he knows, and sometimes, a part of him is tempted. to see what another person’s ribcage would feel like, compared to his own. 

he returns to his volunteer work at bookstores, at libraries, at thrift stores, keeping one ear to the ground about any _other_ strange books that might have appeared, though it feels . . . restless, now. pointless. like he’s just going through the motions. no harm in trying, though. he doesn’t think about what it would feel like to wrap his hands around ruth’s beating heart and feel it tremble, or what it would look like if he could smooth back the wrinkles in the dour old woman’s face who watches him unpack donated boxes of books for her, restocking the shelves. to take his hands to the folds of her skin like kneading out bread dough. 

it’s almost a week. he promised to give himself a _full_ week, but in the end, he’s just too restless for that. it’s been five and a half days, and the first hints of morning light are shining through the window as he holds his breath ( though he couldn’t say _why_ ), closes his eyes, and strips down once again, making his way to the tarp he laid down in front of the bathroom mirror, fingers darting to his ribs. 

and his heart sinks. 

the discoloration - that slight contrast in the paleness of his skin - is still there. it’s clear where the new patch of skin was. but where there had been smooth, clear skin before, the scar continues in the same pattern it always had. 

silver and ridged and fractalling, in spiral-patterns he sees every time he closes his eyes, an afterimage burned into the underside of his brain. it seems _brighter_ than before, like it gleams as he looks at it. like it’s mocking him. there’s nothing enough to be alarming, but the faintest smell of ozone creeps into the room, like a draft edging through the building’s cracks. 

  
  


suddenly, he’s filled with an anger he can’t quite put a name to. a deep, shaking kind of fury that makes his hands tremble. it isn’t _fair._ it shouldn’t be like this. that’s not how scars _work._ he mutilated himself, and - for what? for nothing? for it to begin chasing him once again? 

his fingers, nails blunt, scrabble at the meat of his shoulder, and it’s without thought that he pushes his fingers into the skin there and strips _down,_ like peeling a hangnail down the frame of his skinny body, from his shoulder down his back to where it curves over his thigh, ripping off the scar in one long piece, left dangling off his leg, the back of his arm, hanging like an ill-fitting piece of clothing off the parts of him the scar hasn’t branded. the side of his neck. his cheek. he tears it off like trying to throw a noose from around his throat, leaving a flap of skin dangling from the back of his spine, another hanging like a curtain from his jawbone. 

and for a moment, he feels vindicated. 

a horrible, bloody kind of vindication, looking at himself in the mirror, stripped of the skin that marks him as some kind of prey animal. he barely looks human, half his skin no longer attached to the flesh it contains. something like nausea rises in his stomach, but he _forces_ it down. stares at himself in the mirror and wonders if he could live like this. if he could tear off those last connecting pieces of his skin and live half-bloodied forever. 

and for a moment, he considers it. 

for a moment, he thinks about remaking himself, slimming down his muscles and tissue and stretching the rest of the skin to cover himself, maybe. turning his bones more narrow, his joints more compact, if he has to. 

and then the nausea fades, and his eyes fix on something that impossibly makes his stomach turn in a _worse_ way. 

underneath his skin, writ across the muscle he’s bared to the air now, is a familiar pattern. 

it’s different from how it looks in scar tissue, of course - a different kind of mark. a different kind of blight. not quite that same off-silver, edged with pink where it ridges off his skin. here, it’s a pale red, almost salmon. and it goes _further._ it goes _further_ than the marks do on his skin. those scars he felt out, the continuation of it across his body past where they ended - it was - does this mean it was _real?_ he stares, blankly, at the salmon-colored lichtenberg figure, curving its smug path over his muscle, and watches it shift as those muscles contract in his fear. 

there’s no care to his motions. no thought to how he’s going to undo it. no thought to the _pain -_ because it does hurt, this part, now that it’s no longer superficial, it hurts like ripping a tooth out with your bare hands might, long and lasting. no thought to what comes after. there’s just his frenzied and frenetic fingers, desperate to find _something._ something. 

he’s peeling at his muscle in clumps, feeling his body try and remold itself, to accomodate for the loss, as he strips himself in chunks of meat, not bothering to pause to wonder how it is he’s still _functioning_ like this. tendons snap like violin strings as he rips them from bone, seeing the way that bright white fractals creep over them, as well, in the places where they fall in the path of that lightning strike. wider, wider, he tears himself, baring his chest cavity, his organs, his beating heart. baring the place where reaches of featherlight agony creep in pale brown-white over what he thinks is his liver, reaching with a shaking hand itself ripped half-bare into his small intestine to pull a length of it out like an uncoiled rope, checking frantically for those liminal, haunting patterns, and finding them there, too, like the furthest-reaching tree branches, thin and delicate and bending. 

his eyes drop to the mirror, and his heart sinks. not literally, though he supposes that is a possibility, now. 

his ribcage. his humerus. his femur. even what he can see of his jawbone. 

they warp, in the morning light, but as his trembling fingers reach for them, he feels in his - well. he _knows,_ in every fiber of him, that it isn’t just a trick of the light. 

grooves run through them, like the mouth of a river, curving his bones into those horrid fractal-patterns, recursive and splintering, finite and infinite. they branch off in lichtenberg chains, spiking away from their proper forms, swirl in jagged, precise shapes that distort the shape of his bones, making his ribcage look like a horrible, contorted thing, bending his fibula, tibia, in patterns that make it hard to tell what size they really are, bending and twisting and wretched to see. 

his good hand comes up, shaking, and wraps around one of his ribs. he smooths it, with his fingers, working to reshape it, bend it back into the shape a bone _should_ be. molding and pressing and pushing. when he draws his hand back, he almost sobs. 

it’s _worse._

somehow, it’s _worse._ everywhere his fingerprints had touched, there are dark and jagged lichtenberg cracks, and his rib swirls, impossible, contorted, an optical illusion of collagen and marrow that went and _went,_ curling into and over itself like an ouroboros. 

mike stands there for a moment, his fingers trembling, the layers of himself torn open like the pages of a book, and his eyes, when he meets those of his reflection in the mirror - they’re just as marked as the rest of him, dizzying and uncomfortable, dark only at first appearance, swirling with impossible afterimage-colors if he looks at his own face for too long. 

he shuts them. 

slowly, piece by piece, he packs his body back into himself, shoving things carelessly back in their rough places and yanking his lightning-branded skin back up over them. his body bulges and swells in places where he shoved muscle and organ and tendon in clumsily, the off shape of them showing through his skin. he jabs his fingers into them, mashing the heel of his palm into every distended part of himself until it flattens back into something that resembles normalcy. whether or not it actually is _meant_ to go there is something he can’t make himself care about, right now. not when every part of him is branded, down to his very bones. 

when he’s massaged lightning-scarred skin back into an approximation of what a human shape _should_ be, covering those bare-stripped muscles, he finally allows himself to feel the _pain_ that builds like a hundred waves. he barely notices himself sinking to his knees, his hands clutching at his chest as his body finally demands his attention. as he pays the toll for tearing himself apart and so haphazardly putting himself back together. 

he glances out at the sky. there are clouds in the distance. not here, not now, not close enough that the smell of ozone is nipping like a hungry dog at his heels, but approaching. 

his body screams in a hundred throbbing, piercing pains, of torn muscle and rearranged tendon and nerve endings displaced. but it is bearable. it’s just a flesh wound, isn’t it? a dull throbbing that threatens to overwhelm him, but not that white-hot paralysis that sends him into a brightly glowing agony. it’s a flesh wound. he knows the tears, the cause. it was _his_ hand. he did this. it was something he could control. and that gives him enough power to stagger back up to his feet, legs trembling, gracelessly stumbling forwards to down a few tylenol with hand-cupped water from the bathroom sink. 

his hands rest on the countertop, and he stares at his reflection as though its wronged him. 

silver on brown, concealing wrong-bent bones and flesh and blood. branded through every part of him. 

but he’s going to figure it out. he _has_ to figure it out. he’ll find an answer. 

he swallows as the very beginnings of a plan dawns on him. it’s horrible. but it could work. 

first, though, he’s going to need to know a little more about the human body. an anatomy book shouldn’t be too hard to find in the library. he’ll learn. and then he can act. 

small steps first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> less of gerry's pov this time :( hope y'all enjoyed this chapter!


	3. Chapter 3

the question he has to ask himself, mike supposes, as he feels his hands go through the motions without him - it’s simple, really, busywork, check the inside of the book cover and the back to get a quick grasp on genre, set it in the right pile, fill up the shelves once the piles were running too high, make sure all of the books that were too ruined to read didn’t make it up there. his body knows what it’s doing. ( _you can certainly trust it more than your mind,_ some part of himself thinks bitterly, but he wonders how true that is. thinks about fractals set across the entire left side of his body. wonders if he were able to pull his brain out of his skull and look at it, if they would be there, too, proof of its grasp on his mind. ) 

the question. the question he has to ask himself. his thoughts are scattered, sometimes. he has to ask himself - how far is he willing to go? for his freedom? for some peace, for an end to all this _fear?_

death is an option, he supposes, but there’s some awful, lurching part of him that feels as though he wouldn’t be _allowed_ to. or at the very least - that he wouldn’t find any release there. defiance rises heavy in his throat, burning at where his jaw clenches. whether or not the glowing creature would have him after death or if he would find peace shouldn’t _matter._ he shouldn’t _have_ to die. it’s not a position he ever asked to be in. 

what is he willing to do? how far can he go? 

he’s grateful, almost, that his body seems to be an autonomous machine, his mind lost in himself. what has he done already? his parents are dead. his home is destroyed. he’s been on-foot constantly, trespassing or bartering for a place to sleep, in empty rooms and on rooftops flat enough for him to find some rest and in library chairs when he’s been left to close up. he’s stolen. the book, other things he needs that he can’t quite justify paying for if he can’t carry with him. he’s torn himself apart and let his body rot. 

would he go further? would he be willing to hurt someone else? 

_you already did, didn’t you?_ that other-part of himself says, simply, and he thinks his hands might be shaking. it’s hard to tell. ( he still wonders how they died. whether they were crushed in the rubble, or if his father was already dead before the house collapsed, bloated with sickness, or if they drowned in fetid mud or if they were eaten alive or - he hadn’t been told. he’s not sure they even _knew._ the bodies, when they were retrieved, were considered too hazardous for an autopsy. he thinks about it sometimes. when he can’t stand the thought of lightning-dreams, he sits in the dark on a bed that isn’t his, and wonders if the rot had only spared him out of something like _gratitude._ for giving it something to feed on. ) 

he would kill, for his freedom. it only makes sense to say that much. if he killed his parents - even if it wasn’t intentional, it was still his _fault -_ to say that he _wouldn’t_ be willing to kill a stranger for that selfsame freedom would be a betrayal to them. like a stranger’s life matters more than theirs. 

it feels a little too close to a sunk-cost fallacy. especially on these stakes. but what else is he supposed to _do?_ he pushes the thought away from him. imagines folding it up and slipping it inside one of the book covers his hands haven’t stopped paging through, quickly sorted into a genre pile and forgotten. 

he doesn’t _have_ to kill anyone. that’s not the first step he needs to take.

_so, what? you’re just going to mutilate them instead?_

he frowns at the thought. _i’m sure people would rather be missing a bone than be dead._

pushes that away too. it’s not . . . it’s hardly a real solution, to try and keep everything pressed down forever. pressure building up in a glass bottle will eventually explode. but it’s a temporary solution. that’s all it needs to be. 

as it turns out, the moral quandary is for nothing. the first time he does it, it’s by mistake. pure bad luck for the man who had tried to get his attention. he had been mechanical again, focused on keeping his body working. at once both grounded and afloat. aware of the way his fingers curl around the spine of a book, the weight of it, the slight strain it puts on his wrist, the rasp of the hard cover against his rot-scarred fingertips. aware of his own breathing, his pulse, his body - the world around him is less important. the titles don’t need to be sorted any more than they already are. the noise is unimportant. where he is doesn’t register. 

and so neither does the man trying to ask him a question. not until he rests a hand on mike’s shoulder, trying to shake him out of whatever half-state he’s slipped into. the hand, the way its placed, sends sharp pain arching through mike’s back, startling him. he jumps, grabbing at the man’s hand to push it off his shoulder, and his fingers just . . . . go _through._

it feels different than his own flesh. it’s the first thing he thinks. there’s something . . . like the way you can feel the difference between water and cream, the way one clings to your fingers a little bit more, has some more resistance, the _feeling_ of it different. when his fingers had gone through his own skin, it had been like ocean water, shifting and cool. this is - like dragging his fingers through half-set gelatin. _they aren’t good bones,_ something tells him, even as his hand wrenches back. 

g-d, it’s easier than it should be. 

to rearrange tendon and nerve and bone, and pull something out of the skin. it’s so much easier than it should be. one minute, there’s an unwanted intrusion, a hand resting too-heavy on where the scar tissue knots like an old rope over his shoulder, and the next, mike is staring up at the man, who is staring back at him, and there’s a slim bone hidden in his clenched fist. 

neither of them scream. that’s a small mercy. 

in a jilted voice he’s surprised he can even summon, right now, mike tells the man that he’s going to ask the manager his question, and that he’ll be right back. and with that, he turns and walks away, hurrying the moment he thinks he’s no longer in the man’s line of sight, crouching on the toilet of the store’s tiny bathroom and trying to breathe through the overwhelming smell of potpourri. 

he opens his hand. 

the bone is still there, though - warped, slightly, as though he had been gripping putty. focusing, he rolls it between his fingers, and it straightens back out again. it . . . _looks_ like a normal bone might. he thinks. but, fuck, it’s not like he’s had a lot of experience looking at the human skeleton. he’s got an anatomy book back in his room, the pages dog-eared and filled with highlights from whatever pre-med student had owned ( and apparently lost ) it before him, notes scribbled in the margins. maybe he can check that out when he - no, no, what is he thinking? he hurt someone. he can fix it, if he wants to. he could go back out there and push it back into the man’s hand and - and what, just deal with having to explain that? 

he doesn’t know how long he sits there, the bones of a stranger resting in his hand. he doesn’t know what happened to the stranger, by the time he finally leaves the bathroom. he doesn’t hear what his boss says to him as he finally frees up the bathroom. 

he’s not sure how it is he finds his way back to his room. 

but it’s standing there that he knows his decision has been made for him. 

g-d, his mind is - it - he doesn’t remember walking back up here. just that his nails have dug little crescent-moons into the meat of his palm around the slender bone he still clutches onto. ( he hopes the man doesn’t return. he hopes - g-d, he hopes this doesn’t mean he has to quit the job. it was one of the few places he’d actually been able to work for more than a week at a time, and he’d been _enjoying_ it. there was always food in the morning, and he got to keep clothes and look for books in the items people brought in, and _how is he thinking about this now when he’s stolen a bone from someone_. )

alright. alright. one step at a time. 

he sits down, his legs surprisingly stable underneath him, the shake to them gone. he doesn’t know when they stopped shaking. it _feels_ like he’s still trembling, even if his hands are steady. 

the first step. he doesn’t - well, he _knows_ now that he doesn’t need the book. it feels better to tug it close to himself anyway. the second step. compare the bone to his own hand, flexing his fingers, lining it up with where it would go. had it been the left or the right hand, resting on his arm? he furrows his brow, tries to remember. right, he thinks. most people reach with their right, and the man had been to his left. he’d _heard_ the man’s voice, so he hadn’t been on the side of his bad ear, so the man had been to his left. which . . . works, he supposes, since it’s his right hand that the lightning touches anyway. 

it’s longer than his own bones are. it doesn’t look like it’ll fit his hand right. 

can he afford to care? 

he takes a deep breath in, crosses his legs, and holds his hand with his palm facing down, staring at the lightning that creeps over his skin. that renders it other. 

middle finger, he thinks. a hysterical part of him wonders if it really matters. middle finger, because that’s the longest, and the man’s hands were bigger than his, so _whatever_ finger it had been, that’s the easiest conclusion to draw. for a moment, he looks at his hand, trying to think about how he’ll do this. 

for the longest time, he’s always chewed his nails, or the skin around them. it’s a bad habit. it’s not that he’s doing it now; it’s that it gives him the idea of how to proceed. 

he takes one of the ragged edges of skin that surrounds his middle fingernail, and simply - pulls. 

like tearing a hangnail, just pulling down, and down. but deeper. wider, as he goes, so that by the time he pulls the strip of skin past his wrist, it’s more than a fingers-width across, exposing the place where the bone might go. for a second, he lines them up. compares them. his own is . . . longer, and yet shorter at the same time, curled into a shape like a spring, filing into minute branches of cortical bone. reaching, splitting. 

he expects it to be brittle. to snap when he pulls it out, for some of those reaching branches to be lost in the meat of him, like splinters. but it comes out cleanly. he can see the tendons and muscle flexing around the open space. 

swallowing, he pushes the stolen bone into the space, and feels his other bones crack, shift, joints popping to accomodate for it. quickly, he slides down the patch of skin, as though smoothing down scotch tape. flexes his hand. it feels like . . . clay, molding himself. he cradles the misshapen bone in his hands, looking at it out of the corner of his eyes, afraid to blink. why, he couldn’t say for certain. it might move. it might - is it worse, if he looks at it, and it becomes normal? if it’s all in his head? can he trust what he sees? 

he should get rid of it. what is he meant to do with a bone that exists in creaking, splintering branches? 

he flexes his hand, his new finger, hears something creaking and popping, like his flesh hasn’t fully adjusted to the new intrusion. presses his thumb behind a knuckle still reforming, and cracks it, once, twice, again. doesn’t feel like he’ll ever truly be able to work the feeling away of something being not quite right there. something, he feels, is a little wrong with the bone itself. too stiff to the touch, not wanting to be made into something new and beautiful. not a good bone. he can do better. 

not entirely his thoughts. he knows enough to know that, by now. warily, he nudges the book away from him with one foot, and slips his fractal-cast bone into his pocket. it’ll . . . he can’t use it for anything. but it’s real proof. actual, concrete evidence that there is something _wrong_ with him, that the fractals are _everywhere._ if he can just show it to someone, ask if they see it too - he’ll know it’s not just in his head. 

who could he even ask about this? 

he smooths his thumb over his skin again, compulsively, as though trying to flatten it into a better shape. like clay. shaping himself like clay. 

( he thinks about the story of the golem in prague. a constructed man. a protector. if his body is malleable, a work of creation, now - does that mean he can be a protector? does that mean he’s _safe?_ there’s something he can’t quite reach, here. about the book before him, about clay and blood and the stories used against them and to rally them. about the thing that lets him reshape his body. he’ll find the words for it later. for now . . . he just hopes it’s enough to keep him safe through the night. ) 

  
in his dreams, he stands naked in a hall of mirrors, with each reflecting off of one another. when he lifts his hand, they start to change, one by one. his eyes, his nails, his bones. some turning him more shapely - taller. handsome. broader shoulders, a square jaw, proportional hips. some turning him monstrous, with eyes and limbs akimbo, with muscles that ripple like animals pushing over each other to escape their containment, with his jaw hanging open wide enough to fit rows and rows and rows and rows of teeth. some in-between, in ways that he can’t decide if he finds fascinating or repellent. and some just _keep_ changing. a constant state of change, flowing in shape and form until it shares nothing in common with him but the shade of his skin, the short crop of his hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for it being a little later than usual ive had to work 50 hour weeks the past two weeks bc my boss made me come in saturdays so im [ does a funny little dance ] depressed. anyway here's body horror


	4. Chapter 4

he’s woken in the middle of the night by someone pounding on his door, and alarm has him on his feet in seconds, as though ice water were shot up through his veins. no one should know that he’s here. 

he’s on the balls of his feet, weight soft, gentle, as he begins to pad towards the door, taking care to take the long way around so whoever it is that’s there won’t see his feet moving in the shadows under the doorway. slowly, one step, then another. rock his weight from the back of the balls of his feet to his toes in a fluid motion so as not to make a sound. 

why is someone  _ here?  _ who knew that  _ he  _ was here? was he in any danger? 

the words come as though in answer to his question. like someone’s listening to his thoughts. ‘ i saw your light on. i know someone’s in here, just come on out. ‘ 

mike’s heart sinks in his chest. he knows that kind of voice. 

there’s a kind of tone people have. not authority, not the natural kind, the kind that makes you  _ want  _ to respect them. to trust what they have to say. but the kind that takes glory in having power and knows you can’t do anything about it. a part of mike already riles, instinctively, at it. but they’re right. he has no choice. 

reluctantly, he opens the door, tries not to make his reaction to the landlord standing there obvious. disdain, fear, annoyance, panic. he’s not supposed to be here, and he knows that. knows they both probably know that. the man standing there looks bored, and that’s dangerous. means he’s more likely to start something for the sake of it. get some last kicks in for the day. 

mike knows the type. 

( is it too harsh, to conflate high school bullies with the law? or not enough? the latter has to come from somewhere, after all. nothing happens in a vacuum. he’s been without a home for long enough that he  _ knows  _ how similar they are. ) 

the moment he opens the door a crack, there’s the toe of a upper-middle-class boot wedging itself in, not even attempting to be subtle. 

‘ are you a student here? ‘ 

mike doesn’t respond. just works his fingers on the handle of the door, staring at his own feet, the beaten and weathered white sneakers, the place where he’s been considering duct taping over a hole beginning to emerge in the fabric. could he sew it back up? he has a small sewing kit in his bag, the few things that he keeps with him as he moves from place to place. everything else is . . . ephemeral. 

he doesn’t see the expression he’s being given; but he can imagine it. a sneering scrutiny. most gazes feel the same, down someone’s nose, burning holes in the back of his shirt. 

‘ you don’t even look old enough to be a student. ‘ it’s muttered, a little derisively, and from his pointed downward gaze, mike can see something move in his periphery, hands absently hitching a belt back up. ‘ alright, come with me. ‘ 

and then there’s a hand reaching for him. 

in mike’s defense, he hadn’t meant to do much more than try and push the man away - ineffectually, most likely, but he saw the hand reaching for him and panicked. but the hand meant to shove away goes  _ through,  _ instead, bending aside ribs like reeds in the wind. 

for a moment, they freeze, like that. mike with his hand wrist-deep in this man’s chest, the skin unbroken, and the landlord staring at him, hand in stasis over his belt, reaching for - mike can’t be sure. a weapon, maybe? would this be the kind of man to have a knife tucked into his belt or in the pockets of those worn pants? was it worth the risk of finding out? 

he could just let go. if he draws his hand out carefully enough, maybe they can both leave unscathed. 

the moment passes. 

mike feels his heart beat in his chest, and with it, the landlord’s, a little faster, a little more arrhythmic, out of shape and sped up by fear. the moment breaks, like glass finally hitting the floor. 

and mike makes his decision. 

he’s not the last. 

it’s easier, with the book. killing. that thought is clear-cut enough in mike’s head. he doesn’t want to think too much about whether he means physically easier - the killing itself, the way his hands shift through a body like softened clay, the disposal of it, viscera dropped in divisible pieces into that endless, hungry maw, or the thought of it. it didn’t feel quite like murder. just . . . butchery. all just meat, in the end. 

he’s no  _ shochet.  _ he never thought he would have wanted to be. but he does his best to make it quick. 

there’s a joke to be made, he thinks, a little morosely, sitting in the back of some cafe and nursing half a cup of black coffee long since gone cold, about how killing a landlord wouldn’t have been kosher, anyway. you know. leeches. bugs aren’t kosher. g-d, he misses the dorm room he’d been staying in. he misses the job that he’d been able to go to, to have some money to not be worried about in-case-of-emergency. this is the warmest he’s been in three days, and he’s loathe to get up and head back out into the cool air.

when’s the last time he ate?

he hopes it’s the book making him more aware of his constant, gnawing hunger, clawing at his insides. he  _ knows  _ it’s the book that makes him brutally aware of how skinny he’s become, of the way the meat of him clings to each of his bones in a whiteknuckle cliffedge way, barely holding on.  _ are you happy with what you are?  _ it asks, and it knows the answer. 

the manager is starting to give him longer looks. cafe’s too full to allow some homeless kid to take up a good table with a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched for the past twenty minutes anyway. mike gets up, runs a hand through his hair, and heads into the bathroom. single stall, at least. he shrugs his sweatshirt off and ducks his head in the sink, washing his face, his hair, in the lukewarm water that pours out, scrubbing dry with a handful of paper towels, noting how red the skin is when he dries himself off. 

in the mirror, he looks at his jawline for a long moment, and then presses his fingers to it, pinching, dragging. squaring it, just a little. the feeling of his jaw shifting in his face is - awful, the feel of his teeth grinding together in unnatural ways as his fingers work to knead the bone back into a natural shape. 

it’s not perfect. but if you don’t look too hard, it’s even, and it’s sharper, less rounded. better. 

there’s still a hole in his shoes, he notices, walking back out of the cafe, wiggling his toes in them to watch how the fabric warps around them. he’d meant to duct tape over it, but it kept getting away from him. 

he’d ended up clutching the heart in one hand, standing numbly in his apartment, looking at a patch of shag carpeting. looking at the seams of the sweat-stained starch shirt, across his back. looking down to his own toes, covered in sneaker rubber like they were. anything but the heart in his hand. anything but the blank eyes. he’s aware of how white his knuckles are. 

the heart doesn’t look like a heart anymore. doesn’t - doesn’t  _ feel  _ like a heart anymore. there had been valves, he thinks. what does he remember about the heart? chambers, separate ones. what he holds in his hand now - it feels something between meat and clay. as though he had grabbed a steak at room temperature and begun to mold it. the arteries, veins, pinched off where it had been pulled through the ribs. 

finally, when he brings himself to look at the man’s chest, the ribs are . . . bent inwards, like metal. not snapped, like you would expect bone to be, but bent. warped. 

it’s not bloody. it should be. the heart he’s holding in his hand shouldn’t be - it shouldn’t be so  _ clean.  _

in the second he thinks that, something begins to seep through the cracks in his fingers, trickling down the back of his hand, trailing over the inside of his wrist. for a second, the heart, shuddering and weakly, pumps, clenched into a misshapen chunk though it is, blood squeezing into one bulging ventricle, out an atrium that seems pinched entirely closed altogether. 

and there’s blood. running through his fingers, like meat juice gone rancid. for a second, he just  _ stares.  _

and then he drops the heart, back onto the landlord’s body, staring at his own hand. 

how do you get rid of a body? what is he meant to do now? can he stay here much longer? 

the book sits there, taunting him. so innocuous, but it makes the inside of his mouth taste like blood, a copper-iron-salt that pulses between his eyes like a migraine, like he’s bit clear through his tongue. his fingers remain spread, as though that could reject the truth of them, the red that still stains the fingertips and the membrane that spreads between them. 

the thought  _ you could eat it  _ doesn’t seem like his own, and he dismisses it with a hysterical laugh that splits out of his throat, tearing it from the inside out. even now, all he can think about is the  _ meat  _ of it, the way even his hysteria is reduced to flesh-chords plucking to vibrate the air. nothing but meat, in the end. 

with bloody hands, he’d reached for the book. if he focused enough on the words, he could maybe ignore the tremor in them. 

it’s the same hands that clutch the lukewarm cup of coffee, now. right? mostly the same hands, at least. isn’t it funny, how many things we use the hands for? how much is attributed to them? everything people create, maybe even all we  _ are,  _ attributed to opposable thumbs and a slightly larger brain. meat and more meat. 

which has betrayed him more? his body, or his mind? his hands, or his brain? which can help him now? 

it hadn’t been either, then, in that apartment with bloodspill all over the cheap carpet and his hands, with a dead man lying on the floor, his heart no longer beating because it was no longer there  _ to  _ beat. his hands had been shaking too much, and his mind . . . well, he knows better than to trust that, by now. even so, it was a white haze of static-panic, turning over and over around itself like a rodent on a wheel, sure that if it just ran  _ fast  _ enough, it could break out of the cycle. 

not his body. not yet. 

  
it had been the  _ mouth.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im SO sorry this is like. . . . two days? three? late. work's been hell lately and i'm struggling a bit with this section of the story. still, hope this was okay,. my like, two dedicated readers

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings: body horror typical to the flesh, mentioned/implied child abuse - typical to mary keay, dysphoria, dissociation, allusions to disordered eating. will be added to when relevant. 
> 
> glad to finally get this under way! we're going to try things this way rather than all as one big fic. hopefully it makes it a little more digestible, and a bit more easy for me to update regularly.


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